


come and join the youth and beauty brigade.

by skygrace



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, everyone is miserable and nothing is okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-21
Updated: 2013-04-21
Packaged: 2017-12-09 02:06:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/768727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skygrace/pseuds/skygrace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>anything is better than being alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	come and join the youth and beauty brigade.

**i.** vaguely, eponine remembers a time when her life wasn’t like it is now. she remembers a good childhood, long since faded and dissolved into threadbare clothes, overdue rent payments, days with no electricity and winters without heat. her parents have kicked her to the curb years ago, like her brothers before her, exclaiming about how she’s too old for them to support her, but she knows. it’s hard to remember, but she knows that she must once have been loved. 

it seems so long ago.

**ii.** she works night shifts at the cafe musain, an old and nearly rundown place filled to the brim with drunks and dissolutes. but there are days when it doesn’t matter that she’s been on her feet all day and her shoes are falling apart, days when the prospect of work actually fills her with a sort of excitement. there is a group of students that meet a few times a week in the back room, and among them is a young man who smiles at her and sometimes waves. his name is marius, eponine discovers, and she whispers it under her breath sometimes like a prayer: marius, marius.

**iii.** they become friends, eventually, and he doesn’t seem to notice the way her heart flutters when his shoulder brushes hers sometimes, accidentally. eponine doesn’t have much spare time, but she sees him whenever she can, until the day comes when she realizes that he’s staring at someone else. a girl: she’s beautiful, and eponine knows it. blonde and demure, prim and proper in the kinds of clothes that might have come straight from a magazine. she watches marius’ eyes light up, and her heart sinks like a stone.

**iv.** the meeting is long over. all of the students have left, and eponine is getting ready to close up when she finds him slumped over a table in the back room. grantaire, the resident drunk. he comes here often enough that she knows his name and his drink order off by heart. she shakes him awake, and he resists, mumbling something under wine-soaked breath. “I love him, you know. he won’t even look my way. I’m not good enough, I don’t have any ambition, I’m pathetic. so what do I do? I hang around. why? no idea. there are plenty of dive bars in town, and I always come back here. he won’t even look at me, he hates me, I — “

not all of it is coherent, but she catches enough to be curious, enough to make something stir in her: solidarity, perhaps. a twist in her gut. “who are you talking about?”

he raises his head, bleary and only half-conscious. “the only greek god still walking on this earth.”

**v.** she sees marius and cosette walking hand in hand, sees him lean over to kiss her forehead and tuck a lock of hair behind her ear like a scene out of those cheap and sappy romantic films that eponine sneaks into theatres to see. it’s wrong to hate this girl and she knows it, but eponine also knows that she is a terrible person, above all else. that her heart is black and twisted and she will never be pure and wholesome, gentle or kind. all of these things that marius loves.

she kisses grantaire, instead. he tastes like whiskey and cheap wine ( marius doesn’t drink ). his unshaven face scratches her skin ( marius is always clean shaven ). 

**vi.** they fuck, sometimes - always half-heartedly. and if grantaire mutters enjolras as he buries his face in her neck, she says nothing of it.

**vii.** he’s drunk. he’s drunker than he’s ever been in his life, and her hands are on him and his kisses are sloppy. there’s a thudding in his heart, an odd buzzing in his brain, and suddenly grantaire stops. he grabs her hands and stills them, leaning his forehead against hers with ragged breaths. “I can’t,” but he whispers it so quietly that it’s almost impossible to hear.

“what?”

“I - I can’t. I don’t — I can’t, you’re not him, I just. please, enjolras. please.”

eponine doesn’t know what to say, what to do when his voice breaks, when he starts to sob raggedly. she lets him pass out on her thin mattress. she leaves a garbage can beside the bed, just in case. he’s long gone in the morning even before she wakes at first light for another day of work, and nothing changes. they stay together out of necessity, of convenience. out of a fear of being alone above all else, when everyone around them seems to be happy.

**viii.** there are never any happy endings for eponine and grantaire, but then, there were never going to be.


End file.
